After working for 25 years as Kalispell’s parks and recreation director, Mike Baker is retiring at the end of this year.

“I’ll miss the job. Definitely,” Baker said. 

“The interaction with the community has been very rewarding. That has been my catalyst to keep going all these years.”

Baker will spend more time camping, fishing and hunting, and hopes to visit more with his five children and nine grandchildren. 

People will still see Baker refereeing some high school basketball games. He’s been doing that for as long as he’s been working for the city and he’ll be doing it for at least one more winter.

“I couldn’t play basketball. I was obviously too short and I was a horrible shot. But I’ve enjoyed [refereeing] and had a lot of fun,” Baker said. “The kids every year stay the same age, but you get older. They could outrun me 25 years ago and they can still outrun me.”

Kalispell’s parks department looks a lot different compared to when Baker “saw some opportunities to make a difference with the city” and applied for the job in 1988. 

Back then, Kalispell’s parks department had a director and four maintenance workers. Baker’s predecessor, on the job for about 15 years, was the city’s first parks director. 

The parks department office was tucked away under the basement stairs at the old City Hall. With the building getting renovated, Baker convinced the mayor at the time to move it upstairs as one condition of his agreeing to take the job.

“The city didn’t have a recreation department. They had one program, the swimming pool, and nothing else,” Baker said. One of Baker’s earliest directives was to change that.

Today the parks and recreation department has its own building and 14 employees, one a year-round urban forester. 

It also has several dozen recreation programs for Kalispell youngsters. They include sports, gymnastics, swim lessons, dance and cheerleading, adventure trips, summer day camp and after-school programs. 

The programs employ more than 100 seasonal workers each year, many of whom went through the programs when they were younger.

BORN AND RAISED in eastern Montana, Baker started working for Kalispell after 12 years with the state parks department. 

He began working for state parks when he was 19, spending a summer mowing lawns, painting signs and doing maintenance work at fishing access sites before attending Montana State University.

Baker rejoined the state parks department in Glasgow in 1976 after graduating with a degree in recreation design and management. Two years later he transferred to the Flathead Valley as a district manager, overseeing a region that stretched from Idaho to Glacier National Park and from Polson to Canada.

Baker helped out with wildlife enforcement, parks management, the creation of canoe trails and national forest regulations, and the development of Lone Pine State Park, turning the property from a local “party spot” to a popular park with a visitor center, trails and pavilions. 

“It was a great job,” Baker said about his position. His biggest complaint was the slow pace of state government. “It took so long to do something, to develop a project and see measurable progress.”

Facing a transfer back to eastern Montana in 1988, Baker saw the parks director opening with Kalispell. He and his wife and children had settled in the area and Baker saw a chance to work with a more responsive and agile local government. No matter what someone thinks about how quickly the city of Kalispell moves, it moves faster than the state does, he said.

HIRED BY THE CITY, Baker promised to not try to fix anything that wasn’t broken and to look for slow, deliberate change, but he always for a way forward. It didn’t take long for Baker to start plugging away at some major projects that would eventually reshape parks and recreation in Kalispell. 

In the early 1990s, Baker worked on a community initiative to turn an old city gravel pit along the Stillwater River into Lawrence Park. 

Grants paid for reclamation work and the trails through the park. City crews built roads and restrooms. A Friends of Lawrence Park group formed to help and other local civic organizations chipped in.

Baker later worked to build the aquatic center in Woodland Park. The old pool was 60 years old and falling apart. Every day it leaked more than 10,000 gallons of water into the ground. A bond to build the facility passed with one of the highest approval ratings for a local bond issue, he said.

Baker also helped develop the Kidsports athletic complex. His own children played on the old, rundown ballfields by the city airport in south Kalispell. 

“I just said this is ridiculous. I come from a small town in eastern Montana that has better fields than these,” Baker said about the condition of those sports fields. “I always said the dentists got rich on our fields because the kids were always getting their teeth knocked out with the balls taking bad hops.”

A community partnership formed to sell the land for seed money to start developing the Kidsports complex in north Kalispell. “It was a huge partnership. Now we have a facility that is second to none in the Northwest,” Baker said.

BAKER TAKES LITTLE if any credit for what Kalispell has accomplished. He credits city staff and other officials and most importantly the community for any achievements. 

“Every one of these projects, everything we’ve done, we couldn’t do it without the support of the community,” Baker said. “You don’t just go out and build these things and come up with these ideas. You gotta provide the spark. You just provide the spark and if the community likes it, it takes off like wildfire.”

A national search is underway for Kalispell’s next parks and recreation director. Applications for the job have been rolling in and Baker said he’s confident the city can find someone good for the position to try to provide that spark for years to come. “I have small shoes so they should be easy to fill,” Baker said.

Reporter Tom Lotshaw may be reached at 758-4483 or by email at tlotshaw@dailyinterlake.com.